Advice on RAID upgrade and layout for home server

[andreiz]

I have a TVS-471 that's been running 4x4TB RAID 5 config (2x WD Red 5400 rpm, 2x Seagate Ironwolf 5900 rpm) since just over 2 years ago. I only have 2 volumes on it, one for Plex media and another for everything else, which includes photos, music, TM backup volume, a couple of VMs and miscellaneous other data. All the important data that I can't afford to lose (photos, music, documents, etc) is backed up to Backblaze, but Plex media is not.

I currently don't have 10GbE networking, but plan on adding it as soon as Ubiquiti comes out with an 8-port 10GbE switch.

I just bought a TR-004 expansion enclosure along with 4 Seagate Ironwolf 7200 rpm drives, as well as a QM2 card with 2 NVMe 512GB drives. What I need is advice on how to best reconfigure the system to future proof it and increase the safety and speed (especially for access to photos, which are RAW files shot with DSLR camera).

As far as I can see, there are 2 options:

1) Upgrade the main QNAP drives to the 7200 rpm one by one. Install the old 5400 rpm drives in the enclosure and configure it for hardware RAID 5. Create a thick or static volume for the enclosure and copy Plex media to it. Switch main QNAP to RAID 6 (or RAID 10?) to protect against 2 drive failure. This gives me 12TB for Plex and 16TB for everything else, which should last for now.

2) Install 7200 rpm drives in the enclosure, configure for hardware RAID5, copy Plex media over. Copy VM images over as well, since they would be helped by the speedier drives. Switch main QNAP to RAID 6 (or RAID 10?). This gives me 24TB for Plex (minus what the VMs take up) and 8TB for everything else.

Which is a better approach for my case? Having Plex DB on a faster drive would be great since it's a bottleneck for a lot of Plex operations, but I can live with it being on 5400 rpm drives especially if I add SSD caching. Speaking of, should I use SSD drives for read caching to start with or think about QTier instead?

[andreiz]

I guess to simplify it: if I create a new RAID group on the enclosure and a storage pool on top of that, can I use some QNAP tool to back up the data and system config over to that pool, then delete the existing RAID group on the main QNAP and recreate it as RAID10, then restore the data from the enclosure pool?

[dolbyman]

you cannot backup config to the TR enclosures

best would be to update your existing NAS with larger drives, then use the TR as an external enclosure (storage target) for backups with the old drives (they will be erased)

RAID10 only makes sense if you want to run heavy DB stuff (Random) video streaming will be better on RAID5 or 6 (sequential)

[andreiz]

Yeah, that's what I want: backup to enclosure with the old drives, then rebuild the new drives in RAID6 or whatever. Should I use Hybrid Backup Sync for that or something else?

[dolbyman]

HBS should work fine .yes .. just make sure you do not add the TR as storage pool .. but as dumb RAID enclosure .. a backup is not useful if you cannot read it outside of the NAS (e.g. connected to another computer)

[andreiz]

Well, once backup is done, I plan on deleting the RAID5 group and recreating it as RAID6 or RAID10 and then restoring the system/data from the backup. Is that possible?

[dolbyman]

That should work, yes